Surr Carl Newton (1935–2014)

Carl Newton died, from leukaemia, on Boxing Day, 2014, just short of his 80th birthday. He was, for more than 50 years, a substantial figure (the word giant seems inappropriate for such a slight frame) in the recordkeeping profession. He made a lasting contribution in local government, serving in a major city library and three county record offices; in business, in the steel and oil industries; and in his own consulting practice. He helped to develop and take forward both the profession and the practice of managing archives and records.

Carl was one of that group who began their professional careers in the 1950s and who recognized that archives needed to be managed, not just accumulated, and also that actively managing the records of their employing organization was an integral part of that process. He was, throughout, an original thinker and innovator and often at the forefront of professional progress and application. He was continuously involved in the work of the Society of Archivists, as it then was, the Records Management Society (now the Information and Records Management Society) and the Business Archives Council. Erudite, energetic and enthusiastic in all things that interested him – recordkeeping, professional development, music, railways – and full of a nervous energy that made the more easy-going of us feel idle by comparison, he used his sense of humour and wit (and a sometimes oblique and idiosyncratic view of the world) disarmingly to convince, persuade and cajole his colleagues into doing what he saw as the right thing.

Carl was born on 13 January 1935 in Yeadon, roughly equidistant between Leeds and Bradford, in West Yorkshire.1 His father was a cabinetmaker and his mother taught the piano, implanting in him a love of music that became a central part of his life. He went from Aireborough Grammar School to New College, Oxford, graduating in modern history in 1956. In addition to his academic work, he played cricket for his college and chess for the University. By a process of elimination, and with some encouragement from his tutor, a former member of the Public Record Office staff, he decided on a career in archives and applied for the University College London archive diploma course, completing it in 1957. Before going to UCL, he spent time at the Bodleian, in theory gaining pre-course experience but, in his own view, learning little of value.

Like most products of the professional courses, then as now, Carl began his career in local government. Unusually, however, he joined Sheffield City Libraries in the local history and archives section. He regarded this as an excellent starting point. It was a busy place with a wide range of ‘ordinary’ users and provided a good grounding in customer service and public relations and an antidote to what he regarded as the more elitist views he encountered subsequently in the wider profession. In 1962, he moved to Durham to join his UCL classmate, Alan Seaman, also, incidentally, a product of Aireborough Grammar School, recently appointed as the first County Archivist there and with a brief to set up the new County Record Office. Starting from scratch, they developed systems and approaches that they thought would work and that were most suited to the new service – a first taste of innovation. They had no proper office or storage facilities, just rooms in one of the Georgian houses in Old Elvet, opposite the then County Hall. The new County Hall was being built at the time and they planned and organized material for eventual transfer to the new County Record Office in that complex. While at Durham, he demonstrated his mainstream credentials by producing a highly-regarded published guide to the papers of the Marquess of Londonderry deposited in the County Record Office.2

He moved to Staffordshire in 1966 as Assistant County Archivist. Staffordshire Record Office, set up in 1948, had well-established systems, providing less scope for innovation but more scope to develop essential wider management and supervisory skills. Carl gained his first post in charge of a record office, and began his long association with East Sussex, in 1970 when he successfully applied for the post of County Archivist at Lewes. While at East Sussex he started his relationship with both computers in archives and with records management. He quickly saw the potential of computers for describing archives and developed a keyword-based system (ARCAIC) that was the first of its kind in the UK. The PRO was also developing its first computerized system, PROSPEC, which emerged a year later, as part of the planning of the new record office at Kew.3 Michael Cook points out that because of this early work on computers ‘he managed to get East Sussex included in an international symposium organised by the PRO – surely a first for a local record office’.4 Carl introduced records management to East Sussex, setting up the record centre in Lewes which continues in operation today. More tellingly, he introduced a system of what he called pre-archival records control (PARC), using the same computer system. Typically, he rejected both the ‘hands off’ approach of dual review inherent in the Grigg system, and the detailed retention schedules favoured by North American practitioners. Instead he proposed, what seemed to me then and now, a fiendishly complex system of continuous review, fully under archival control.5

Carl's time at East Sussex coincided with the reorganization of local government in 1974. He was appointed County Archivist of the new East Sussex authority but had spent much of the previous year as a member of the county council's team working on the setting up of the new authority. He saw this as a major step forward for an archivist and one of the high points of his career. His decision, at that high point, to join the growing British Steel Archives and Records Management Service as its Northern Regional archivist was driven by a feeling that, having reached the position of county archivist at the age of 35, career development opportunities in local government were limited.

Moving to business offered something new and he thrived on it. A move back to the North was also attractive. He hoped that a business environment would provide a greater opportunity to develop his interest in records management and in computers. Once established on Teesside he also observed that seeing the product emerge from the manufacturing process established more directly the relationship between the records produced and the activities they recorded than was possible in a more remote administrative environment. He felt at home and, he said, could happily have spent the rest of his career there. We became colleagues when I joined British Steel as Regional Archivist for the East Midlands in January 1976. Carl's move there had been influential in my joining British Steel. I was much taken by his work at East Sussex, and his decision reinforced my perhaps naïve view post-UCL that the future of archives and records management lay in the more dynamic business sector.

I shared Carl's almost visceral excitement at working in a multi-billion pound business and selling records management and, ultimately, archives to people who generated vast volumes of records in the course of producing and selling steel but who had no coherent idea of the value of those records to the business or how best to manage them. Covering a ‘parish’ of more than 50 works and offices, from large integrated steel works to small back-street operations, most of them producing tangible output for sale, was both challenging and exhilarating. In addition to the sharp end work, Carl, as we all did in our respective regions, ensured that the surviving records of the pre-nationalization companies in the region – Dorman Long, South Durham Steel, Consett Iron and Steel, Barrow Iron and Steel, for example – were identified, packed up, transferred, listed and stored under archival control on a single site. This facilitated their subsequent ‘discovery’ and transfer to the Teesside archives following privatization of British Steel and their exploitation by the University of Teesside British Steel archives project.6

In the end, we were both to be disappointed. The industry was on the cusp and, from 1976 onwards, the corporation began to make huge losses. Management focused on the cost of the records operation rather than its putative savings. Development resources were simply not available and we had all begun to think about pastures new. Carl found them in the shape of British Petroleum. The company approached him when they heard that he was planning to leave British Steel to join one of the American North Sea operators. After a protracted interview process and an agonizing wait as his notice to British Steel ran out, he joined BP in 1979 as company archivist ‘with a view’. He took on the company's slightly moribund records management programme, employing a number of bright young newly-qualified archivists as his team of data collectors and analysts. Helen Simpson, a member of that team, recalls that Carl used this opportunity to shape the creation and use of information to support the business process. He engaged with IT colleagues to promote consistent recordkeeping, irrespective of medium, and raised questions about managing email ‘which all seemed rather revolutionary in the early 1980s’. He was keen to ensure that the team was properly prepared for the task. Helen describes how he invested in the professional development of his new recruits, helping them to bridge the gap between their diploma course theory and the realities of business – a process he once described to me as helping new entrants to ‘unpack their bag of tools’, something he felt that, as a profession, we did very badly. BP had for a long time been a leader in developing records management programmes, though, subject to constant change, the effectiveness of those programmes had been inconsistent. Carl did a great deal to re-establish the position.

Like many large organizations, BP was almost obsessive in moving managers to new posts every couple of years. While this was no doubt a boon for managers, giving them the opportunity to gain wider experience, develop and move up the greasy pole, they barely had time to get their feet under the table before being moved again. Consequently, records and archives management programmes had little time to develop and mature. BP was restlessly looking for new approaches, globally, to managing information and records. In 1982, Carl was asked to join the company's Information Systems Administration, a ‘think tank’ of 12 individual specialists charged with creating a corporate information management strategy. This proved a career-changing move. In that role, he produced a Records Management Manual for the group (The Black Book), probably one of those comprehensive volumes, frequently spoken about and referred to, but seldom read and applied. At the same time, he was able to proselytize about archives and records management to the other specialists, something that he continued to do throughout his working life, believing that records people were too reticent in promoting the value of their skills and expertise. In a subsequent change, he joined the Information Systems Services organization, leading a team of in-house consultants advising the various business streams on records management. In a culture where service departments were expected to charge their clients, this was the only team within the directorate that was seen to cover its costs and even to make a profit.

As at British Steel, changes in management attitudes meant that the future of head office advisory units became uncertain. His in-house unit's success encouraged him to see a profitable future in providing such services as an independent consultant. Initially, in 1986, he left BP to join James Martin Associates, a leading information technology consulting firm with which he had worked at BP, providing records management consultancy alongside their more mainstream technological offerings. JMA's subsequent merger with Texas Instruments persuaded him, with consulting experience under his belt, to venture out on his own in 1988 as Strategic Information Management, providing records management advice and using the approaches and documentation developed at JMA. He sold that company in 1994 and set up a new one, Document Strategies Limited with Teresa Blackmore. Clients ranged widely across the public, private and not-for-profit sectors and projects included basic records management and archive consultancy, data assessments and rationalization, mail system streamlining, document imaging and electronic records management and information strategies. He was meticulous in adopting best practice in-house for managing the records of what was a highly effective and profitable business.

He remained in business formally until 2000, when they wound up the company and Carl ‘retired’ to Eastbourne. However, he continued to take on occasional ‘interesting’ work, including being tempted out of retirement by Teresa to work with her on what turned out to be his final project: developing a records management scheme for the Archives and Records Association.

This rapid and superficial encapsulation of Carl's working life provides only a partial view of the range of his professional contribution. In a formal sense, he was a member of the Society of Archivists and its successor, the Archives and Records Association. He served on the Society's National Council as a regional representative. He was, by his own admission, a dedicated ‘committee man’, involving himself in a number of committees, including a working party on developing a new constitution for the Society. The group presented its recommendations to the Society's AGM in 1974 and they proved extremely controversial. Most of the proposals were rejected and they were sent back to the council for review and re-presentation at the 1975 AGM. In a long meeting opposition remained strong. Carl spent much of the meeting on his feet defending the proposals against trenchant criticism from the floor. The proposals were ahead of their time and many of the suggestions were subsequently adopted as the Society grew and developed.

He had been in the firing line before and was regarded as something of a maverick by the more traditional members of the profession. His suggestion, in an earlier intervention, that the society's executive should be ‘taken out and shot’, for failing to work with NALGO on professional salaries, is part of folklore and legend and marked him out in some quarters as a dangerous radical. For a number of years he was a member of the team evaluating the university-based professional training courses, visiting all the participating universities except University College Dublin. A founder member of the society's Records Management Group (RMG), Carl presented a paper on records retention at the Group's inaugural regional ‘Introduction to Records Management’ conference, at Liverpool in 1977, and remained active for many years.

Moving into business, in his own words, ‘widened his professional horizons’. It also led to his joining the Business Archives Council and becoming active in the council's affairs. He helped to set up the Northern branch of the BAC, served on its national Executive Committee from 1979 to 1988 and was a member of its publications working group. In that capacity, he persuaded the council to focus one of the two issues of its journal Business Archives each year on professional and technical issues for business archivists and records managers, rather than on the content and use of business archives. This was an important step in the professional and practical development of business archivists.7 Carl was a founding member of the Records Management Society (now the Information and Records Management Society) and active in the discussions and processes leading to its foundation in 1983. He maintained this connection with the society and they honoured him in 1999 by choosing him as Records Manager of the Year. Outside the profession, while in local government, he was an active member of the National Association of Local Government Officers (NALGO) and was, at one point, acting chair of the Stafford Branch and editor, and radical columnist, of its newsletter.

In addition to his ‘committee man’ activities Carl often spoke at meetings and conferences, at which he seemed always to be present. He chaired the RMG's working party on the impact of automation on records management and was the principal author of its 1981 report which, looking back, was remarkably prescient.8 His interest in strategic planning, developed over many years, led to an RMG occasional paper on applying it to records management and archives (1984).9 A brief and rather lordly and pompous review of this paper in the Society's Journal highlighted Carl's ‘addiction to the jargon of the management expert and his jokey examples (Titania PLC in Oberon, state of Athenia, manufacturers of widgets and toggles)’.10 These tendencies never left him. Over the years, he contributed both incisive and informed reviews and challenging articles to the Records Management Journal, including two in recent years which reflected on his growing concern for the archives of voluntary organizations,11 bodies which he regarded as uniquely important in British society, and the archives of music.12

Assessing the impact of computerization on the future of records and archives was probably the most significant of his many contributions to professional thinking. Being an ‘early adopter’ at East Sussex in the early 1970s led naturally to an interest in the ‘upstream’ impact of computers on producing and managing records and the challenges created for the archives of the future. The 1981 RMG report set out some of these challenges. His exposure to BP's leading edge approach, combined with his links with James Martin Associates, enabled him to refine his analysis and prescriptions into the chapter on the Future of Records Management which appeared in my book (1989).13

Perhaps his key intellectual insight was recognizing the coincidence between Theodore Schellenberg's identification (1956)14 of records as the product of business functions, activities and transactions and the functional analysis applied in developing computer systems. As an early proponent of functional analysis, Carl was a precursor of much of the thinking behind DIRKS15 and ISO 1548916 and of the ideas of macro appraisal developed by Terry Cook and others in North America and Australia. His experience at BP also led him to believe that recordkeeping professionals needed to drop their antipathy to others working in the information field and to recognize that the boundaries between them were becoming more fluid. Unlike others, however, he believed that archivists and records managers had a unique perspective which they needed to promote in the wider context. They should not lose their identity in the process and should be less retiring and apologetic than hitherto – a view he held consistently and continuously.

He held other strong views on those things that exercised the thinking of his professional colleagues. As late as 2011 these came through in a series of deliberately provocative but anonymous contributions to ARC. He was dismissive of what he saw as the ‘fad’ for ‘community archives’, insisting that archivists should work with archives that exist rather than try to create them and ‘hand over their professional birthright to community archives’.17 He attacked the conservatism of ‘the last totalitarian profession’ and demanded that archivists should come into the modern age and ‘recognise they are servants of the public, not agents of organised power’. There should be a ‘statement of the principles, procedures and objectives of the profession’ accessible to ‘participants, users, politicians and the general public’.18 He castigated the ‘white glove brigade’ for placing additional barriers between the user and the document, while suggesting that archivists in handling, describing, packaging and storing the material were much more likely than the public to cause damage.19 Finally, he made an impassioned plea for the nationalization of business archives as ‘a resource of the nation’ rather than ‘junk or dangerous material’ that many businesses saw them as. They might accept the value of artefacts, but not of the records describing their construction or operation. Reflecting his experience with Railway Heritage Committee he suggested that the funds raised for restoring The Flying Scotsman would have ‘given us the finest National Business Archive in the world’. Business archives should be seen as part of the national patrimony and monitored, resourced and subject to a statutory regime. He described the National Business Archives Strategy as ‘typically British … high on good intentions, low on resources’. 20 Predictably, there was little response to these challenging ideas, forthrightly expressed.21

Outside his professional life, Carl's prodigious energy was focused on his love of music, and particularly the music of Elgar. He became an active member of the Elgar Society and, inevitably, joined the Society's executive committee. Having persuaded his colleagues ‘to do something’ about the Society's archives he was given the job. The collection now housed at the Worcestershire Record Office is a tribute to his energy and determination.22 He was also for many years a member of the Eastbourne Recorded Music Society and performed a similar task by putting together a comprehensive volume incorporating the important documents of the society. Recordkeeping was never far from his thoughts.

A true Yorkshireman, his love of cricket was deep. One of the attractions of working in Sheffield was playing for the library team (he insisted that that's why he got the job in the first place) and also being able to get to Bramall Lane to watch Yorkshire play there. He played for his college and played club cricket in the Durham Leagues. In the 1980s, he was an enthusiastic member of the Business Archives Council's team in their annual fixture with the Society of Archivists, when we were opponents, and then of the Society's own team in matches played against the PRO, when we were teammates.23

Railways were also a more than passing interest. While at East Sussex Carl produced a guide to the records of railways in the county24 and was always a dedicated enthusiast for the Settle to Carlisle railway that crossed his beloved Yorkshire Dales. He had a large collection of railway timetables accumulated over the years. As an aside, he used the railway timetable to illustrate the differences between published materials, data, records and information: the timetable was a publication containing a lot of data about the running of trains; it was a record of the company's timetabling section's activities; but this content only became information when a potential traveller needed to identify a particular train or trains to plan a journey. He was a member of, and then an adviser to, the Railway Heritage Committee set up under the auspices of the Department of Transport to determine the fate of the records of British Rail and its predecessors following privatization of the company. More personally, he took his new wife Kathie, an American whom he married on his 78th birthday, on a series of journeys by train to introduce her to the parts of the country he knew well and loved. Together they were discovering new enthusiasms in addition to their shared love of music. They were, for example, taking art appreciation classes at the University of the Third Age in Eastbourne.

To the end, Carl remained a committed professional. He wrote. He attended and participated in conferences and events. He was an active and involved Visiting Professor in Archives at the University of Northumbria. One of his last acts, in early December 2014, was to pack his extensive professional library into eight boxes for donation to the University College London archives course, his professional alma mater. Only the final effect of his illness was able, ultimately, to dilute and diffuse his characteristic energy.

Consummate professional, committee man, controversialist, enthusiast, humourist, self-confessed workaholic, good colleague and entertaining companion, friend, mentor – he was all these things, and more. Carl will be remembered with affection by all those – colleagues, clients, customers and fellow enthusiasts – who came into contact with him over the years. And they will miss him.

Notes

^1. Most of the biographical and career information in this piece is derived from Carl's 1997 oral history interview in a programme, Celebrating Memory, carried out as part of the Society of Archivists 50th Anniversary celebrations. The originals of the interviews are in the British Library Sound and Moving Images collection at catalogue number C1181. Transcripts have been uploaded to the Internet Archive by the project leader, Dr Craig Fees, and can be accessed at http://web.archive.org/web/20041103150946/http://www.pettarchiv.org.uk/fsg/soa50.htm and http://web.archive.org/web/20041106025152/http://www.pettarchiv.org.uk/fsg/soa51.htmI'm also grateful to Teresa Blackmore, Michael Cook, Edwin Green, Craig Petts and Helen Simpson for filling in some of the gaps in my knowledge and providing additional information on Carl's life and work and helpful comments on early drafts.

^2. Newton, S. C. and Stewart, A. C. R. V. T. The Londonderry Papers. Catalogue of the Documents Deposited in the Durham County Record Office by the 9th Marquess of Londonderry. Durham: Durham County Council, 1969.

^3. This was my first contact with Carl and his work. Michael Roper, teaching the newly-established Computers in Archives module at UCL in 1973–1974, described the East Sussex system to his students, of whom I was one. This, and Michael's description of PROSPEC and the opportunities that computers provided, certainly fired my own enthusiasm. The rapid development of computers made both systems redundant almost before they had been implemented.

^4. The proceedings of this conference were published as: Bell, L. and Roper, M., eds. Proceedings of an International Seminar on Automatic Data Processing in Archives. London: HMSO, 1975.

^5. Newton, S. C. “Pre-archival Records Control in East Sussex”. Journal of the Society of Archivists 4, no. 7 (1973): 581–587.

^6. A similar pattern was followed in Wales with the ‘discovery’ of the archives of the Welsh steel companies at the Tata Steel records centre. These had been rescued, recorded, packed and shelved by my staff at the British Steel South Wales and Shotton records centres in the early 1980s.

^7. Edwin Green has written a more extensive appreciation of Carl's contribution to the BAC in the Council's Newsletter [Upcoming].

^8. Records Management Group. Office Automation and Records Management: Report of a Working Party. Sheffield: Society of Archivists, Records Management Group, 1981.

^9. Newton, S. C. Strategic Planning for Records Management and Archives. London: Society of Archivists, Records Management Group, RM P 4, 1984.

^10. Anon. “Notes and News.” Journal of the Society of Archivists 7, no. 8 (1985): 557–558. Damning with faint praise, the review goes on to wonder whether the time spent in devising and implementing strategic plans and expressing them in fashionable terminology might not more usefully go on traditional professional activities such as listing, but in the competitive world of commerce a struggle for a role and the resources to carry it out, conducted in a more or less foreign language, may be forced on the archivist or records manager. Nothing could have better illustrated the professional elitism that Carl rejected.

^11. Newton, Carl. “Trumpeting the Voluntary in the United Kingdom.” Records Management Journal 14, no. 3 (2004): 107–110.

^12. Newton, Carl. “Discordant Notes: The Archives of British Music.” Records Management Journal, 18, no. 1 (2008): 61–68.

^13. Newton, Carl. “The Future of Records Management.” In How to Manage Your Records edited by P. Emmerson. Cambridge, ICSA Publishing, 1989.

^14. Schellenberg, T. R. Modern Archives: Principles and Practice, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1956.

^15. National Archives of Australia. DIRKS [Design and Implementation of Recordkeeping Systems]: A Strategic Approach to Managing Business Information. Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2001.

^16. International Standards Organisation. ISO 15489-1:2001 Information and Documentation – Records Management – Part 1: General. Geneva: International Standards Organisation, 2001.

^17. [Newton, S. C.] (2011:1) “Community Archives: Inspiration or Indictment?” ARC, 259, 32.

^18. [Newton, S. C.] (2011:2) “The Last Totalitarians: Archivists, Archives and the Public”, ARC, 260, 10.

^19. [Newton, S. C.] (2011:3) “Conservation or Consternation? The Saga of the White Gloves”, ARC, 261, 34.

^20. [Newton, S. C.] (2011:4) “The Case for Nationalisation”, ARC, 262, 30.

^21. I was flattered that many colleagues thought that I was the author of these pieces.

^22. A tribute to Carl on the Society's website also mentioned his penchant for points of order at meetings – something which his professional colleagues would remember with a combination of affection and frustration. http://elgar.org/elgarsoc/elgar-society-mourns-loss-carl-newton/.

^23. I have, in my photograph collection, some relatively unflattering ‘inaction’ shots of Carl, myself and others in one of the PRO matches on Ham Common.

^24. Newton, S. C. Rails Across the Weald. Lewes: East Sussex Record Office, 1972.